Fresh Produce in the Arctic

Talk about food miles; in Iqaluit, everything is flown in or canned. The town runs on diesel fuel and Nunavut is the largest emmitter of greenhouse gases per capita in Canada, possibly the world. The vegetables are old and tired by the time they get there.

Now the town of 7,000 has a community greenhouse and citizens are setting up boxes to grow vegetables. "It's kind of hard to imagine right now," says Mr. Lamb, the group's president, "but we hope by the end of the season, and our first harvest party, people will think it's kind of a neat thing."

It sounds like a greenhouse on Mars. According to Sara Minogue in the Globe and Mail, The biggest challenge is moderating Iqaluit's extremes of hot and cold, and light and dark. To keep his plants alive during the brief but cold summer nights, he's set up a passive solar system. That is, about 20 plastic garbage cans filled with water. In the daytime, the water heats up, and in the evening, the heat dissipates to warm nearby plants. Later on, he hopes to install a curtain system, to block out sunlight for part of the day. ::Globe and Mail